DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, professor of television Studies at Rowan University. Many of you may recognize this voice.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "STORMY WEATHER")
LENA HORNE: (As Selina Rogers, singing) Don't know why there's no sun up in the sky - stormy weather since my man and I ain't together.
BIANCULLI: That's Lena Horne from the 1943 film "Stormy Weather." She became Hollywood's first glamorous Black movie star. We're going to listen back to an interview with her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, who wrote of her family's journey from enslavement to the Black bourgeoisie. She died last month at the age of 86. Gail Lumet Buckley grew up in New York, Los Angeles and Europe and graduated from Harvard. She worked at Life magazine before marrying the celebrated film director Sidney Lumet, with whom she had two daughters. Their marriage ended in divorce after 14 years. She later remarried.
The discovery of an old family trunk filled with artifacts going back six generations led her to write her first book, "The Hornes: An American Family." She said writing the book helped her recognize her Blackness and her Americanness. She followed that book with another family history and memoir, "The Black Calhouns: From Civil War To Civil Rights." Her first family history, "The Hornes," began with matriarch Sinai Reynolds, who was enslaved in the South but eventually bought her own freedom. Buckley followed the Horne family in the North, where they were part of the Black middle class of Harlem in Brooklyn.
Lena Horne's grandmother was a friend of Paul Robeson's and helped fund his college education. She was a childhood friend of W.E.B. Du Bois. Lena Horne's Uncle Frank was a member of FDR's so-called Black cabinet. And though Lena Horne was considered Hollywood's first glamorous Black star, she was given few roles because of racial discrimination and communist blacklisting. Terry Gross spoke with Gail Lumet Buckley in 1986.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
TERRY GROSS: Welcome to FRESH AIR.
GAIL LUMET BUCKLEY: Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here.
GROSS: Why did you want to write about your family?
LUMET BUCKLEY: Well, it was the material that said, write about me, or write about it, or however material speaks to you. But I had this trunk of family papers that had been in my grandfather's trunk, which actually was - contained all the sort of the life of this family. It was amazing - through six generations, all the papers of my great-grandfather, who had been in politics and journalism in the 1870s and 1880s. And there was these wonderful newspapers where he'd written about the Civil Rights Act of 1875. There was a letter from Benjamin Harrison, president of the United States - not a very exciting president but president nonetheless - personal letter, diaries, photographs, family memorabilia. That was just - it seemed to me this is an aspect of Black life that has rarely, if ever, been portrayed, this sort of story of quiet achievement and of people who were in the mainstream, fighting the battles quietly that eventually, a hundred years later, would lead to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s.
GROSS: The Horne family was a pretty prosperous family.
LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes, as Black families go. Yes.
GROSS: I'm reminded - a poet once said to me that most Black people are expected to tell stories of what it was like growing up poor, and white people always want to hear that from them. And I wonder...
LUMET BUCKLEY: Yeah.
GROSS: ...If you think that's true and if you think, in the process, that the Black middle class has really been overlooked or not understood.
LUMET BUCKLEY: I think that's a very astute point. I think that's why nobody's really cared about the Black middle class - because they weren't headline-makers. They were people who lived perhaps as your family might have lived - quietly, going about their business.
GROSS: You referred to the Black bourgeoisie and use that term more than the Black middle class.
LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.
GROSS: Let me ask you about the expression.
LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes. Well, it comes from E. Franklin Frazier's book of the same name, "The Black Bourgeoisie." And the people I'm writing about were the Black bourgeoisie that he was writing about. The Black middle class is something else entirely - I mean, what I consider the Black middle class, which is something born in the 1960s. They were the 1% when you read the statistics, say, in 1900 who were in business, who were professional - Black professionals. They were lawyers. They were teachers. They were doctors. They were educated clergy. They didn't make a lot of money. The economic avenues open to the Black middle class today did not exist before the 1960s. They did not exist for the people I'm writing about. There were a few Black entrepreneurs, for example.
GROSS: How did the Horne family become a member of this more prosperous class?
LUMET BUCKLEY: Well, I think it started right after the Civil War. They were fortunate in their slavery, if you could call slaves fortunate. They were house slaves. They lived in Atlanta rather than in the country. My great-great-great-great-grandmother bought her freedom in 1859 for herself and for some of her children, not for all of them. My great-great-great-grandmother remained a slave. She was a household cook in the family of Andrew Bonaparte Calhoun in Atlanta, Ga. He was the nephew of John C. Calhoun, slavery's greatest apologist.
When he died after the war, he left money to my great-great-great-grandmother's daughter, who was living with my great-great-grandfather, her brother, and they had money. They were literate. They could read and write. Their mother could read and write. So after the war, my great-great-grandfather bought a grocery store, bought property, sent his two daughters to college, was able to be - this is a man who spent half his life in slavery. But he was able with emancipation and with radical reconstruction. This is the key - that radical reconstruction was the best thing that has ever happened to Black people in America until the 1960s.
GROSS: Your grandparents seemed to have been the couple that violated the traditions...
LUMET BUCKLEY: Yeah. Yeah.
GROSS: ...Of the Horne family.
LUMET BUCKLEY: Third-generation black sheep is what they were. They said, to heck with all this uplift and being do-gooders, because my great-grandparents were definitely do-gooders.
GROSS: What did your grandparents do to earn the reputation of black sheep?
LUMET BUCKLEY: Well, my grandfather theoretically - this is family history. We hope it's true. At least I hope it's true 'cause it's fun - made a killing on the Black Sox scandal of 1921, the baseball fix. He certainly suddenly had a lot of money in 1921 and had run off - he ran off to Seattle that year, ran away from his wife and his 3-year-old daughter, Lena. He was away out of her life for a long time. Shortly thereafter, her mother left her to go on the stage. And this was unheard of because her mother had also been brought up in the bosom of the bourgeoisie. And the stage - the only career that a Black bourgeois woman could accept honorably was teaching, and that's when they did work. They taught or social work. And to go on the stage was tantamount to prostitution.
GROSS: So your mother ended up getting shuttled back and forth between relatives in the South and in the North.
LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes, she did. She lived - she was initially brought up by her grandmother in Brooklyn, the wonderful Cora Calhoun, feminist and suffragette. And then her mother decided, I want this child back. And she didn't really want the child. She just wanted to make her mother-in-law mad, it turns out, because she would be touring in these tent shows in the South and would leave little Lena with whoever happened to be around while she'd go off.
And so my mother created a sort of dual personality for herself - her Southern personality when she'd go to one-room schoolhouses and the kids made fun of her accent and her skin color and then the other personality that she'd have, too, which was her real personality, when she'd go back to her grandmother and to Brooklyn and her friends in Brooklyn. Finally, there was a semblance of security when her uncle Frank was dean of a college in Georgia and brought her and said, I'm taking you to live with me for a while, took her to Georgia in 1928.
GROSS: So in a way, she was really a perpetual outsider...
LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.
GROSS: ...As a child.
LUMET BUCKLEY: She was. She was an outsider both in the middle class, in a way, even though those were her roots, and certainly with poorer Blacks among whom she lived but was not - did not really belong.
BIANCULLI: Gail Lumet Buckley speaking to Terry Gross in 1986 - more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 1986 interview with Gail Lumet Buckley, who wrote two books chronicling the history of her family's path from enslavement to prominence. Her mother was singer and actress Lena Horne. Gail Lumet Buckley died last month at age 86.
GROSS: How did your mother start in show business?
LUMET BUCKLEY: Well, she'd done amateur theatrics in clubs, in her various little clubs in Brooklyn. The Junior Debs, they were called, and they would do - she wanted to sing and dance. Her mother - she'd always had dancing and singing lessons, and her idol was Florence Mills, a great Black star of the '20s with a meteoric career who died young. And she'd done amateur theatrics, and when her grandmother died, her mother decided, I'm going to put this girl on the stage. She's pretty, and she's talented. Let's see what happens. So at 16, she was put into the Cotton Club.
GROSS: It's interesting. Her father provided protections...
LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.
GROSS: ...That'd speak for her...
LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.
GROSS: ...When she was playing in these clubs that were frequently run by the mob.
LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes, absolutely. Dutch Schultz's mob protected her in the Cotton Club because he was very close to Dutch Schultz's Black numbers men.
GROSS: Your mother spent some time touring with the Charlie Barnet band, and they'd tour through the South...
LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.
GROSS: ...And run into all kinds of segregation problems. Did she ever consider trying to pass for white during that period?
LUMET BUCKLEY: She never did, though people earlier in her career and later in her career - all through her career in the early stages, people would suggest it, and she always refused.
GROSS: When your mother, Lena Horne, signed her MGM contract, she was, as you describe her, the first glamorous Black star in Hollywood. So, I mean, before her...
LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.
GROSS: ...What could Blacks play?
LUMET BUCKLEY: Well, you played domestics, or you played jungle extras. She was also the first long-term contract ever given a Black player in Hollywood, and she was Walter White and Paul Robeson's test case. She was a test case to the NAACP, which had decided they were going to change the image of Hollywood. It was World War II. OK, let's - you know, we're supposed to be fighting for democracy. Let's do it at home. And this was part of this program, and she was it. She was the test case.
And that made her the enemy of a lot of Black actors in Hollywood, who were very upset. And they said, you're trying to take work away from us. There'll be no more jungle movies. There'll be no more old plantation movies. What are you trying to do? And Paul Robeson said to her, these people aren't important. The people who matter are out there - the Pullman porters, those people. And they want to see a new image, and you've got to do it. She said, OK.
GROSS: So what did Paul Robeson want your mother to do?
LUMET BUCKLEY: Wanted her to refuse to play a domestic, to refuse to play any role that was demeaning to Blacks and to stick by that and not be swayed from it.
GROSS: Did she have any doubts about taking on this work?
LUMET BUCKLEY: Well, she did. She did, and she went back to New York kind of very upset. I mean, it had all been so fast. She'd...
GROSS: It's quite a responsibility.
LUMET BUCKLEY: It's an incredible responsibility, and she'd been this sort of overnight, huge success in the Hollywood nightclub. She'd auditioned for Louis B. Mayer, who'd said, yes, sign her up instantly. And, of course, the first role that they screen-tested her for was for a maid part, so they were really kind of trying to get out of it. They weren't taking it very seriously. But Robeson and Walter White were taking it seriously, and she was taking it seriously.
And her father, Teddy Horne, the gambler, came out to Hollywood - flew out, very dapper, and demanded an interview very politely with Louis B. Mayer and said, I can afford to hire a maid for my daughter. She doesn't need to play a maid. And they were bowled over by this. They'd never seen anything like Teddy Horne or heard anything like that from a Black man who was not political, anyway.
GROSS: So did she get roles? Were there roles for her?
LUMET BUCKLEY: There were no roles. There were never roles. It could not - it did not go that far. All her scenes were cut out of the South. In the South, her scenes were cut out, so she had to be filmed separately. So she never had roles. She just had moments in movies.
GROSS: Why don't you explain how that worked when they cut out parts that she was in...
LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.
GROSS: ...In the South? Like, in "Words And Music," which was...
LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes, they would cut out...
GROSS: ...The movie biography of Rodgers and Hart...
LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.
GROSS: ...How would that be done?
LUMET BUCKLEY: They would cut out "The Lady Is A Tramp," which she sang in. They would just snip it out, take scissors and snip, snip when it got south of the Mason-Dixon line.
GROSS: So she couldn't be in anything that furthered the plot.
LUMET BUCKLEY: No, she could never be in anything that furthered the plot or was crucial to - no - that was a crucial moment in the movie - never.
GROSS: She must have been very frustrated.
LUMET BUCKLEY: She must have been.
GROSS: Did she ever talk to you about that?
LUMET BUCKLEY: She only talked about it when she did her show, funnily enough, finally. She compensated by making a very hugely successful nightclub career and a very successful career in Europe.
GROSS: You went to Harvard, and your going to Harvard coincided with the civil rights movement.
LUMET BUCKLEY: No, it didn't, actually.
GROSS: Didn't you go when you...
LUMET BUCKLEY: I graduated in 1959.
GROSS: Oh, I thought you went a little later than that.
LUMET BUCKLEY: No. I graduated before there was the civil rights movement, the woman's movement, the pill, pot. We were prehistoric. We were the Eisenhower generation. We were - when I was a senior, my roommate's fiancé, who was a wonderful - who is a wonderful white liberal - I hate the name, to say white liberal, 'cause it sounds like they're not real. But he is one of the great true liberals. I've - we have to make this word ring again with its true beauty and honesty and everything else - said, let's go picket Woolworths.
This was 1959, and I said, why are we picketing Woolworths? I mean, I knew they were picketing Woolworths in the South, but I didn't connect the Cambridge, Mass., Woolworth with the Southern Woolworth. I was really naive and silly, but there was no civil right. There was nothing going on, so I went to - I thought I was going to stay in Europe and live there.
GROSS: When the civil rights movement did grow...
LUMET BUCKLEY: Well, it was Kennedy that got me back. In 1960, I came home and immediately went out and campaigned for Kennedy and made speeches for him and voted for him - the first person I voted for. My entire class - the entire Harvard class or the people I knew - I won't say the entire, but, I mean, a huge percentage went to Washington. Then patriotism was not the last resort of whatever it is - scoundrels.
GROSS: Your mother, when she got married, made sure to keep Horne in her name. So she used that as just - she continued to use that name...
LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.
GROSS: ...As her stage name...
LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.
GROSS: ...Then used hyphenated names...
LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.
GROSS: ...For her private life. But Horne was always in it.
LUMET BUCKLEY: Yeah.
GROSS: And Horne really meant something...
LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.
GROSS: ...In...
LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.
GROSS: ...New York.
LUMET BUCKLEY: Yes.
GROSS: You never really had Horne...
LUMET BUCKLEY: No.
GROSS: ...In your name.
LUMET BUCKLEY: My name - I had it once. Gail Horne Jones was the name I was christened or baptized - Gail Horne Jones.
GROSS: Has writing the book made you want to, like, stick it back in? No?
LUMET BUCKLEY: No because I - well, I signed the book contract as Lumet. And then I married Kevin Buckley, and I wanted Buckley to be in there. So it was a funny - I couldn't - there was no way to be Gail Horne 'cause it wasn't really my name. I mean, it would be Gail Horne Jones Lumet Buckley. That's too many, unless I did sort of G. H. - you know, there's an M. K. P. Fisher or whatever her name is. So it was difficult.
GROSS: I want to thank you a lot for talking with us...
LUMET BUCKLEY: Thank you.
GROSS: ...About your family.
LUMET BUCKLEY: I loved doing it. It was fun.
GROSS: Thanks for being here.
LUMET BUCKLEY: You're a wonderful interviewer. Thank you.
GROSS: Oh, thank you.
BIANCULLI: Gail Lumet Buckley speaking to Terry Gross in 1986. The daughter of Lena Horne, an author of two books about her family's history tracing back to enslavement, died last month. She was 86 years old. After a break, we note the hundredth anniversary of the birth of writer James Baldwin by revisiting a 1986 interview with him. This is FRESH AIR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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